


the magnus archives (gerry keay romantic mystery remix)

by the_cosmos_lonely (dheiress)



Series: tma remixes [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Asexual Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Canon-Typical Fear Content (The Magnus Archives), Canon-Typical The Web Content (The Magnus Archives), Demiromantic Character, Dimension Travel, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Polyamory, Spoilers, Time Travel, Unreliable Narrator, Work In Progress, actually, no beta we die like archive assistants
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:15:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28316625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dheiress/pseuds/the_cosmos_lonely
Summary: Gerry peeks around the large shoulder to see dark skin and crescent scars. An unfamiliar face that yet somehow invokes a gut wrenching nostalgia in him, as if this unknown man were a dearly missed childhood friend reunited after so many years. But that is inconceivable, utterly senseless, Gerry has no friends as an adult, let alone as a child.The second man’s eyes open and it’s too dark to properly see their color but Gerry swears as the rumbling noise which apparently only exist in his head slows down into a rhythm of one, two, one, two knocking as if his skull was a door someone is trying to get through, he swears—They glow.(This, Dekker says, is the point where Gerry blacks out.)
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Gertrude Robinson, Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: tma remixes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2073849
Comments: 12
Kudos: 84





	the magnus archives (gerry keay romantic mystery remix)

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays everyone! I hope you all are having a good time!
> 
> I am trying to shame myself into writing more of this universe by posting so please know this work is a WIP.

* * *

The two of them stalk through the abandoned house like a pair of spectres. Gerry wonders if at some point later Gertrude would receive a statement from one of the Hilltop Road residents detailing an account of midnight haunting in the house at 105. He scoffs. She’ll probably just chide them for being so careless as to be seen.

Dekker clears his throat and Gerry’s head snaps up towards him. The man is holding the unlit torch like a sword in one hand, the lighter on the other like a shield. His brows are arched up, silently questioning Gerry.

Gerry waves the question away with the hand holding his own lighter. 

The old man rolls his eyes at him, sighing that annoyed breath not unlike Gertrude’s when Gerry irks her. Each day their mannerisms get more like the other’s, bleeding together in a generic Irritated Old Person Syndrome, that at this point travelling with Dekker is just like what travelling with Gertrude has been. Gerry was only half-joking when he told them last week they should get married, though the twin glares the two gave him when he said that has sent him laughing too uproariously to be taken seriously.

Treading lightly on the rotting wooden floor, they move forward the cupboard under the stairs with the old man leading and Gerry trailing behind him. He directs his eyes at the ceiling for a brief moment, a stray thought wandering inside his mind. For a purported Spider’s lair, the house is free from any webs, occupied or otherwise. Just damp, decaying lumber with damp decaying furniture left forgotten in a house nobody even tries to knock down. Something about it makes Gerry feel...weird. _Weirder._ When he whispers this to Dekker, the old man just shakes his head slightly and says, “All the more reason.”

Gerry presses his lips together. Too many questions with too few answers, none at all actually. All this evasiveness and secrecy from Dekker and Gertrude makes his head throb. He pockets the lighter and switches it with the bottle of paracetamol tablets which he pops opens. Out a white tablet comes stumbling from the bottle and into Gerry’s waiting mouth. He swallows it dry, the tip of his tongue flitting over his teeth to try and chase away the papery aftertaste paracetamol always gives him.

He feels Dekker’s eyes, heavy and considering, on him but neither of them says anything as the old man opens the little cupboard and fumbles with the light switch.

The cupboard’s light must no longer be working, Dekker makes a defeated hiss and lights his torch instead. He beckons at Gerry with a small tilt of his chin and, after igniting his own torch, down the darkness Gerry follows him, into the dank basement where Anya Kusuma reports a crack from where she hears voices screaming out for help.

* * *

Gertrude starts acting weird earlier this year, around March.

Well, as weirder as a seventy-year-old woman with a penchant of blasting things that don’t go her way could get.

She starts getting more...well,  _ reckless _ is not the right word for it but it’s the closest thing Gerry could think of at the moment. He hesitates to say that she has become more open or trusting in the past months because he can see that it isn’t what happened, is happening, though she did include more people into her fold. Gerry returning to her like a prodigal son after last year’s quest for Leitner ends with him scaring one pathetic, snivelling old man finds that in his quasi-absence she has procured Dekker and two spanking new archival assistants to do her bidding in his stead.

“Oh, don’t be jealous,” she says to him, flapping one deceptively frail hand at him as she drinks her tea, “You have your own errands.”

Gerry is not jealous. He has no idea where she gets this idea and he tells her this much.

“Of course not,” she replies, her sharp eyes momentarily staring at him over her thick blue glass frames before turning back to the thin, yellowing papers in her hands. Gerry manages to read the words ‘my dear Jonah’ in an elegant script as she folds the already brittle paper lengthwise and inserts it into one of her bulging envelopes that are covered by handwritten notes that look like hers and two others. 

Gerry has no degree in library science but even he thinks that’s no way to handle centuries-old documents.

“It kept for a hundred years,” she shushes him, “it’ll survive a little bit of folding.”

A little bit of folding apparently means the envelope it is placed in is further folded crosswise and then rolled before being stuffed into a beige drawstring bag that says 'Greatest Aunt in The World!' in bright red letters.

Gertrude does not have any nephew or niece.

"Now that's settled," she declares, placing the beige drawstring bag beneath her desk.

"Gerard, I have mentioned Adelard to you," she motions to the old, black man sitting behind her with a neutral, almost disinterested look on his face.

She has mentioned Dekker to Gerry once or twice over the course of the year they’ve practically travelled around the world, of course, although the way Gerry understood it he died a tragic but heroic death somewhere in Germany, battling an avatar of The Corruption. 

The man, obviously alive, blinks at Gerry. 

Gerry blinks back.

Gertrude waves a hand at the two people of Gerry's age standing at the doorway of her office, "those are Timothy and Sasha, they'll also be helping with the investigation."

The woman, taller than Gerry and dark-skinned and someone Gerry will consider beautiful if she weren't destroying the structure of Gerry's neatly made-up world, makes a small smile and a smaller wave in his direction. The man beside her, taller than Gerry but smaller than the woman and light-skinned and also someone Gerry will consider beautiful if he weren't also destroying the structure of Gerry's neatly made-up world, leans on the doorframe and just arches his eyebrows at him.

Gerry turns back to Gertrude.

"The investigation?"

"Yes, The Investigation."

"On how to stop the Unknowing?"

There's a beat, almost imperceptible, where Dekker and Gertrude's lips thin simultaneously and Gerry hears a subtle shifting from behind him. Not really a second, less than half of one in fact. 

Like a hairline crack in window glass, if you angle your eyes away you could unsee it.

Gerry could ignore and forget this moment if he wishes to.

"Yes, of course," Gertrude says, her fore and middle fingers tapping her wooden desk with a beat apart.

_ One. _

_ Two. _

"To stop the Unknowing," she says, still as a portrait and the glint of her bright blue glasses hiding her eyes, “what else would it be?”

" _ Yay _ ," Gerry hears his mouth say drily, as if he swallowed brittle paper, "Let's go, team."

* * *

If Gerry would be asked to make a statement for it later, he’ll describe it like this:

Just as they reach the landing of the basement’s stairs, just as the cupboard’s door creaks closed above them, that crack, that fissure which webs out like hair-thin fingers reaching out for whoever enters, on the basement floor, it—ah, he has no other word for it, except—it  _ opens _ . Like a yawning mouth or, or uh, a blinking eye from which a silent scream or tears of darkness pour forth. The ground beneath his feet trembles and he loses sight of the growing abyss as Dekker grasps his shoulder to steady himself or Gerry, Gerry’s not quite sure.

A vicious hiss cuts through the rumbling noise that starts at the roots of his teeth and ends banging in his ears. Another migraine, in another wrong place, at another wrong time. 

Gerry looks back to the fissure that seems to penetrate beyond the ground, beyond the earth deep under, even beyond the reality of his world, and he sees the appendages first crawling quickly — or were they  _ thrashing _ ? — out of the void. He counts eight of them, long, angled, and hairy. Then, the fangs and the pedipalps. The chelicerae and the spinnerets on the opposite ends of the beast rise out next from the vast nothingness of the crack. Then, the eyes, somehow still glinting in the dark like eight pools of blood.

_ Of course. _

Then. Then, he sees the sac. It oozes out from the spider’s spinnerets like a great silver worm wriggling out of some cursed pit, then it falls squirming wet onto the dirt floor unbroken by the ever-growing crack. Dekker’s hand turns into claws around his shoulder, dragging him back towards the crickety staircase. 

“We need to go now,” the old man hisses at his ear, the urgency in his voice cutting through the numb panic that Gerry hadn’t realized blanketing him.

Before either of them could take another step back, however, there comes a sound from the roiling mass of drying silver web neither of them expects.

A shout, muffled and almost distorted, but clearly a human’s voice.

Gerry is a just step behind Dekker as the man runs to help whatever poor soul is trapped in that enormous egg sac. Together, they rip through the thick spider silk, digging until their fingers meet flesh. They only manage to drag out half of the flailing man’s body before he too is turning around to dig, clawing at the webs as he screams.

“Jon,” he is shouting, crying, “Jon, Jon,  _ Jon, Jon! _ ”

Gerry falters at his own web ripping, trying to place where he has met this man before. This man they’ve freed from The Spider’s Egg, he has auburn hair that is matted and dirty, a wide built that is deceptively soft-looking, his eyes—

“ _ Jon _ ,” a final cry, a whimper of relief from the man. Dekker hasn’t been distracted like Gerry is and he’s now pulling out a smaller frame from the mess of limp silken web. With more strength than Gerry expects, the first man wretches the rest of his body out of the sac and clambers towards Dekker and the smaller body. 

Gerry peeks around the large shoulder to see dark skin and crescent scars. An unfamiliar face that yet somehow invokes a gut-wrenching nostalgia in him as if this unknown man were a dearly missed childhood friend reunited after so many years. But that is inconceivable, utterly senseless, Gerry has no friends as an adult, let alone as a child.

The second man’s eyes open and it’s too dark to properly see their colour but Gerry swears as the rumbling noise which apparently only exist in his head slows down into a rhythm of one, two,  _ one, two _ knocking as if his skull was a door someone is trying to get through, he swears—

They  _ glow. _

(This, Dekker says, is the point where Gerry blacks out.)

* * *

_ The Darkness sheathes your Eyes with the shame of all the hidden things you’ve Seen but it cannot suppress the Eyes of those Watching you, you feel Their Gaze on your skin both like a Heat that offers neither light nor comfort in this burning cold and like an incessant writhing of a Multitude already loving not you but the Flesh once yours now soon be its Home and you Know without Understanding that if you were made to Look, you’ll only see a reflection of your Eyes reflecting Theirs made Stranger in the reflection of Their Eyes, an Abyss Gazing back into the Abyss of Your Eyes, like a snake simultaneously choking and spitting out its own tail, like a Corridor that leads everywhere and nowhere at once, and it makes your confusion swirl all the more potently with the fear and Anger dripping from your bared teeth, it makes you want to lash out at anyone you’ll find in here where you Stalk for the unseen predator preying on you, mindless of the Great Empty Expanse bearing down on you, Suffocating you with your Loneliness and the thought of ‘Is this real? Or am I the Only One Left alone and insane in this hellscape?’ _

_ In the Dark, with those Eyes watching you steep with all the Fears, you feel Your End ever living in the nonexistent shadows dogging your feet. _

_ Do you really want to know how This Story ends? _

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Will update tags per chapter.


End file.
